Hector Guimard

Hector Guimard (Lyon, March 10, 1867 – New York, May 20, 1942) was an architect, who is now the best-known representative of the French Art Nouveau style of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of Guimard’s buildings were destroyed after his death, but he started to be rediscovered during the 1960s. Now, scholars have reconstructed his career and he has been the subject of much research. Still, one hundred years after what Le Corbusier termed the “magnificent gesture” of Art Nouveau, most of Guimard’s buildings remain inaccessible to the public, and he has no museum devoted to him. However, original architectural drawings by Guimard are stored in the Dept. of Drawings & Archives at Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University in New York City.